Stepping back - my experience is that points are solving a problem good organizations don't have.
The practice I see work well is that a senior person comes up with a high level plan fror a project with confidence intervals on timeline and quality and has it sanity checked by peers. Stakeholders understand the timeline and scope to be an evolving conversation that we iterate on week-by-week. Our rough estimates are enough to see when the project is truly off-track and we can have a discussion about timelines and resourcing.
I just don't see what points do for me other than attempt to "measure velocity". In principle there's a metric that's useful for upper management, but the moment they treat it as a target engineers juice their numbers.
On the one hand, they simply can't. They're a measurement of effort, and a junior dev will take more time to finish a story than a senior dev will. On the other hand, at the sprint velocity level, yes of course they're supposed to be equivalent to time, in the sense that they're what the team expects to be able to accomplish in the length of a sprint. That's not dishonest, that's the purpose.
> The practice I see work well is that a senior person comes up with a high level plan fror a project with confidence intervals on timeline and quality and has it sanity checked by peers... I just don't see what points do for me other than attempt to "measure velocity".
Right, so what happens with what you describe is that you're skipping the "wisdom of the crowds" part, estimation is done too quickly and not in enough depth, and you wind up significantly underestimating, and management keeps pushing the senior person to reduce they're estimates because there's no process behind them, and planning suffers because you're trying to order the backlog based on wishful thinking rather than good information.
What points estimation does is provide a process that aims to increase accuracy which can be used for better planning, in order to deliver the highest-priority features faster, and not waste time on longer features that go off track where nobody notices for weeks. Management can say, "can't they do it faster?", and you can explain, "we have a process for estimation and this is it." It's not any single employee's opinion, it's a process. This is huge.
> but the moment they treat it as a target engineers juice their numbers.
How? Management doesn't care about points delivered, they care about features delivered. There's nothing to "juice". Points are internal to a team, and used with stakeholders to measure the expected relative size of tasks, so tasks can be reprioritized. I've never seen sprint velocity turn into some kind of management target, it doesn't even make sense. I mean, I'm sure there's some dumb management out there that's tried it. But what you're describing isn't my experience even remotely.